"The punishment was," she continued, hardening her voice, "to strip me to the waist and whip me in public. The law allowed this, and this they would have done to me. But your father, being chairman of the bench--for the offence lay outside the borough--would have none of it, and argued and forced three other magistrates to give way. Little good he did, you may say, seeing that my name is such in Falmouth that, only by entering my door, the Mayor just now did what all his cleverness could never have done--stopped a riot by a silly brutal laugh--the chief magistrate taking shelter with Moll Whiteaway! You can't get below that for fun, as the folk will take it; and yet I say your father did good, for he saved me from the worst. And to-day of his goodness he has not remembered my sins, but treated me as though they were not; and today, as only a good man can, he goes from my house, no man thinking to laugh except at his simplicity, even though it were known that I kissed his hand. God bless you, Sir John, and teach your son to be merciful to women!" My father was ever so shy of his own kind actions that, when detected by chance or painfully tracked out in one, he kept always a quotation ready to justify what pure impulse had prompted. So now, as we hurried across the deserted Market Strand to catch up with the other three, he must needs brazen things out with the authority of Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "It was a maxim of that excellent divine," said he, "that Christian censure should never be used to make a sinner desperate; for then he either sinks under the burden or grows impudent and tramples upon it. A charitable modest remedy, says he, preserves that which is virtue's girdle-fear and blushing. Honour, dear lad, is the peculiar counsellor of well-bred natures, and these are few; but almost in all men you will find a certain modesty toward sin, and were I a king my judges should be warned that their duty is to chasten; whereas by punishing immoderately they can but effect the exact opposite." We found our trio waiting for us on the far side of the square; and, having fetched our horses and left an order at the inn for Billy Priske on his return to mount and follow us, wended our way out of the town. The streets on this side were deserted and mournful, the shopkeepers having fastened their shutters for fear of the mob, of whose present doings no sound reached us but a faint murmuring hubbub borne on the afternoon air from the northward--that is, from the direction of the Green Bank and the Penryn Road.